As social networking becomes more prevalent across the Internet, more user information is potentially exposed across a wide variety of sites. While social networking applications have empowered users to share friends, music, and numerous aspects of their personalities, they have also raised numerous privacy concerns. Many users may wish to freely share information between close associates, but would also prefer to keep sensitive personal information safe from other third parties whose interest in such information may not be in a user's best interest.
Most social networks utilize varying degrees of privacy protection. User logon and password authentication are the most common. However, this first level of protection only ensures that the person having the password has the right to be on the network. One approach utilized to increase security in some social networks is to establish preferences that correspond with privacy settings. However, this coarse granularity in privacy settings may not adequately protect sensitive information. For example, preferences may be established for a social network in which a user has close friends as well as casual acquaintances. In those cases, utilizing a preference model may be too broad to protect an individual user's privacy interests.
Another issue confronting privacy is that some privacy settings schemes are simply too complex for users to easily navigate. In those examples, schemes requiring multiple levels of security may result in users ignoring settings altogether or inadvertently exposing sensitive information. As such, managing privacy settings for a social network are provided herein.